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Fruit & Orchards

Hardy Kiwi pollination - no bees???

13 years ago

I was just wondering what other kiwi growers have noticed in terms of bees pollinating the flowers?? I have a patch of black raspberries (a yellow variant actually) about 30 feet away from my kiwi vines that were just loaded with honey bees when their were in bloom. There were literally hundreds of bees in the patch at one time. This was before my kiwis bloomed. My kiwis will be done flowering within the week and I have yet to see a single bee on a flower. I've done some manual "dusting" with the male flowers just to be sure there is pollination. Anyone else notice lack of insect pollination with hardy kiwi???

Tyler

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Comments (5)

denninmi
13 years ago
I can't really recall seeing bees attracted to mine, either, but somehow they always get pollinated. Flies of some kind, perhaps?
tyler_j
Original Author
13 years ago
It would sure be more comforting to see some type of insect attracted to it thats for sure.. rather than hope the wind directs the pollen to the right area lol. You've gotten good fruitset on yours Denninmi just letting it be? Have you noticed many flowers not get pollinated if any??
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Your silver vine will not pollinate your arguta kiwis as the polygama blooms several weeks before argutas. Even if you saved pollen and hand pollinated I believe chances of setting fruit would be marginal to nil but heck it would be worth a try. You could use male arguta pollen to pollinate kolomikta and polygama females If you were breeding hybrids but not so much the other way around. Same as fuzzy kiwi males can pollinate arguta females but not the other way around. It has something to do with smaller or shorter sperm of the smaller species which cannot reach where it needs to go in the larger species. I tried a few years ago to pollinate female argutas with kolomikta pollen with no luck. I plan on keeping a female kolomikta in the fridge and bring her out during arguta bloom period and see how that goes. It will be a good experiment for you though,simply cut off a few silvervine branches and put them in some water in the coldest part of your fridge then pull them out when the time is right. Good luck,Glenn
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austransplant
13 years ago
I too do not see bees on my hardy kiwis, but they have set tons of fruit this year. I suspect they are in part wind pollinated. I read somewhere that some growers of regular kiwi fruit have the male plant growing up a pole above the females so that pollen can rain down on them.
denninmi
13 years ago
I've always gotten fruit in quantity pretty proportional to the blossom count in any given year -- lots of flowers = lots of kiwis. Some years, of course, the flower count is low to none due to late freezes that zap the emerging growth, or if the darned things were just out of control and I had to cut them way back.

There are a lot of pollinators out there other than Apis melifera honeybees.

That being said, I do have 6 beehives right now, but for about 15 years from 1996 to last year I didn't keep bees due to varoa mites, and always had many kiwis during those years. I planted my original kiwis in 1988, when they were really new and almost unheard of. Got them from Raintree.
sunandshadow
13 years ago
I'm in zone 6 and my new hardy kiwi vines don't have flower buds yet - does this mean I won't get any fruit this year? There are only some small green bumps emerging from the vine which might develop into flowers later.

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